Comments on: Mozy Backup + Reinstalling Windows = FAIL

By: pradeepsp

pradeepsp — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:57:23 +0000

I can add some perspective from personal experience. I have two drives on my primary workstation. Drive C: has about 18 GB of work files. Drive D: has images, movies, etc. to the tune of about 285 GB. For some reason, my D: drive went offline (SATA wire got unplugged). Mozy thought that my D: drive was out and it ran a sync backup and reported that I had only 18 GB backed up. I flipped out. I re-hooked up my D: drive and Mozy recognized everything and then seemed to proceed to re-upload all of the 285 GB of data from that drive. Well, what actually happens is that it recalculates some indices, etc., and brings your data back up to date. It initially took me over three weeks to upload all of that data, but the second “upload”, which was just a re-indexing, took only like 8 hours.

So yeah, the client and system seems to smart enough to know situations like this. I haven't tried this on an a full OS reinstall/upgrade, but I would expect it would work approximately the same way. The tech support person did not seem to understand how the product works.

By: smile man

smile man — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:26:02 +0000

Their Level 1 seems to be crappy (as mentioned), but if you get escalated, then you are taken care of well. The escalations/premium support guys know what they're doing, and if they don't know they're not afraid to say "Let me find out".

When you do a backup, any file that needs to backup has a hash (I guess is what you call it). If a file on their server has that same hash, then the file will not upload. That's why file path doesn't matter on a OS fresh install.

When you un-install, the local information of what files are backed up is removed. So when you re-install (or install on the new system), it has to try and backup everything. Reason it doesn't just go off of the list of files you've backed up in the past is because of changes. What if a file changed without the program knowing, and didn't back it up thinking it was already backed up? Bad things could happen! So it does a full backup, and files that already exist on the server is just encoded.

By: randomtech

randomtech — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:58:04 +0000

I am in the same position now – have to upgrade from Win7 RC to RTM. I hope Clint's approach above works! What a pain otherwise.

But I am intrigued – why is Backblaze better? You didn't say apart from the slowdown (which I have never experienced with Mozy)

Anyway I may be looking to switch from Mozy if my backups are not seamlessly switched over.

By: gadlen

gadlen — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:57:44 +0000

Crashplan has a pay service too. I'm using it and so far I like it. I'm glad you like Backblaze. Let's hope neither of us need to use our backup tools.

By: edrabbit

edrabbit — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:48:13 +0000

gadlen,

I switched to Backblaze and so far I've had a great experience. No computer slowdowns during backing up. I checked out Crashplan, but rather than rely on friends or family, I'd rather pay someone to keep my data safe.

By: gadlen

gadlen — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:05:27 +0000

So Ed, how did it work out for you?

I'm trying out Crashplan from Mozy. Of course the switch takes months of uploading :-(. I'm looking to switch partially because my computer is unusable for the 30 minutes each day Mozy takes to evaluate my backup set. I like the ability of Crashplan to send redundant backups to friends but I haven't yet found a friend that wants to trade backup space that doesn't live in the Bay Area with me.

By: matt_tulk

matt_tulk — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:20:17 +0000

I am also going through this after updating to Windows 7 its crazy each file should be tagged and from Mozy end should be able to tell its aleady there and ONLY upload files where the block level data has changed.

Trust me I work in Storage/SANs and this is a major fault with the product as people suggested earlier is should actually be take a snap shot of youre machne hardware NOT youre PC name as this can change when you rebuild like mine did.

its bloody stupid and of course support cant seem to figure it out.

By: bill1935

bill1935 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:31:25 +0000

ah yes…this is that exact reason why I switched to Ubuntu. With that you can create a back-up ISO of you entire hard drive and settings using remastersys.

By: Guest

Guest — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:21:45 +0000

@Clintonbrowne

Without having tested the procedure!

The support claimed in the chat, that Mozy could even re-associate the files when they are not in the same path as before after the upgrade/migration.

This might be of importance for those who migrate from a german windows XP to a Windows 7 any time soon, because the path to the documents will change. (C:Dokumente und Einstellungen... to C:Users...)

Greetings Michael

By: baanpro

baanpro — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:21:57 +0000

This whole blog topic is Ridiculous. You think you can get free support (basically $4.95 is free), free storage, and then complain when the product doesn't have every feature you want. Good backup services cost $100/mo or more, especially if you want them to store 400GB of data up in the cloud. Note what the tech said “your old data and backup data can remain in our server for only 30 days”. What about those files that have been missing for more than 30 days. I guess you're out of luck!